Nikita Gale: SOME WEATHER

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Los Angeles-based artist Nikita Gale summons a storm of colour and light to London, Seoul and Tokyo, shifting the urban climates in a major new commission that marks the CIRCA programme’s expansion from their home on Piccadilly Lights, now broadcast across screens in two new cities.

Curated this month in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, London, directed by Zoé Whitley, Gale’s new series of four films titled ‘SOME WEATHER’ spotlights the creative labour of Black women whose voices feature in some of rock music’s most acclaimed recordings, from the Rolling Stones to David Bowie. Four films -- ‘Heat’, ‘Fog’, ‘Blizzard’, and ‘Rain’ -- will feature throughout June, appearing daily with the unpredictability of weather patterns. Each takes on a different radiant hue, employing the immensity of these cities’ advertising screens to shift the atmosphere of their respective urban settings.

Gale, an artist who works using sound, technology and sculptural installation, notes: “Some of the most definitive recordings in the genre of rock and roll have used the voices of Black women as background singers. This creative labour has been used to foreground the performances of some of the most iconic rock performers of all time, mostly men, many of them British: The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Phil Collins, to name a few. In the ecology of both the stage and the recording, all of these elements that are not the band or the lead singer become a kind of sonic and cultural ‘weather.”

In SOME WEATHER, the singers’ voices, their physical presence, and the context of their original performances blur. Each film features archival footage of background singers rendered unrecognisable, manipulated to such a degree that their images exceed the scale of easy consumption. Obscured, they commune with weather patterns that beam out across London’s iconic Piccadilly Lights and two new CIRCA screening venues at Seoul’s K-Pop Square and Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, in addition to appearing online each evening at 20:21 BST on the CIRCA website. 

The artist asks us to consider what capacity such monumental screenings have to change the atmosphere of their surroundings. In a vivid haze of immersive geoengineering, the artist re-orientates audiences to the unsung contributions of backing vocalists. Adopting writer Toni Morrison’s use of the term ‘weather’ in Beloved, Gale describes ‘weather’ as “the slippery space between bodies and atmosphere where breath joins the wind, sweat joins the ocean, and so forth. The image of these performing figures is obscured and transformed in such a way that they become visual representations of some types of weather: heat, fog, rain, and snow.” They can be experienced for a brief moment but remain ultimately inscrutable. 

Gale’s work straddles image and text, memory and identity. Through explorations of human beings and their invisible yet indispensable labour, the artist reveals the inner-workings of creative production and processes of achieving innovation. In spring 2022 Chisenhale Gallery will present the first UK solo exhibition by Gale as part of their Commissions Programme.

Zoé Whitley, Director, Chisenhale, quote: "Nikita Gale is an artist of consistently unique insights. As a sculptor who manipulates sound, a thinker so deft with words, and a maker of genuinely surprising new encounters, it was clear that Gale would meet the challenge of creating a first public artwork with verve. That we have four new videos only demonstrates the ambition and variety of the artist’s practice, with more exciting things to come in 2022.”  

Josef O’Connor, Artistic Director, CIRCA, quote: "We’re honoured to be collaborating this month with Chisenhale Gallery, expanding on their influential exhibition history and experimental vision to present this new and ambitious work by Nikita Gale. Breathing fresh possibilities from our home on Piccadilly Lights around the world, SOME WEATHER will also be shown across screens in Seoul and Tokyo, where audiences can now also experience the CIRCA programme throughout the year.”